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New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

We already knew that Capcom thought to have Phoenix Wright as a playable character in Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, but it had to be cut in the end. Now we can read about some of the Tatsunoko characters that never made it into the final game, thanks to an article on Kotaku:

The hardest part of making the game, it seems, was figuring out which characters to include from Tatsunoko’s more than 80 cartoons, and then getting the company to OK their choices. […]
“One of the main anime we got more requests for than any others was Samurai Pizza Cats,” he said. “There were a lot of people who wanted to see that. I wanted to see that, but we couldn’t reach an agreement.”
Another set of characters shot down by Tatsunoko were the transforming-motorcycle riders of Genesis Climber MOSPEADA.
“They told us what we could and couldn’t use,” he said. “If they said no we cut them.
“We weren’t privy to a lot of their decision making process. They didn’t share a lot of reasons with us. When they said no and we asked why, they wouldn’t tell us, but would give us another suggestion.”

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!

Mega Drive / Genesis, Sega

Smaartvark [GEN MD – Cancelled]

monokoma

03-04-2010

4 Comments

Smaartvark (also know as “Arnie the Aardvark” and “Miniature Aardvark TV Repairmen”) is a cancelled platform / action game that was in development by Codemasters for the Genesis / Mega Drive. The title is a wordplay between “aardwark”, a medium-sized mammal native to Africa, and “smart”: infact the main protagonist of the game was an aardwark TV technician, as we can see from its sprite in the screens below.

There are not much info about this project and we dont know why it was never released. It seems that the player had to repair a TV by entering in its channels and defeating the bugs that cause the problem.

Thanks to Rod_Wod and Celine for the scans!

Images:

Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

Jon Ritman’s Soccerama [SNES – Unreleased]

monokoma

02-04-2010

3 Comments

Soccerama is a cancelled sport game that was in development by Domark for the Super Nintendo. The project was programmed by Jon Ritman, a software developer, notable for his work on major 1980s video games. It seems that Soccerama started as a soccer game for the arcades, but that version was never released and the game was later ported to the Nintendo 16bit console. Sadly, even the SNES version was cancelled, because of a bug.

A couple of screens of Soccerama SNES were found by Celine in Banzzai #27 and CD Consoles #4

At the Amstrad Museum we can read an interview with Jon Ritman, with some info on the development of Soccerama:

v: in the 80’s there was news about a proyect game called soccerama. did you make any preliminary version and what happened with that game?
r: soccerama was on an arcade machine than was never launched – the game was finished though but really not that different from matchday 2.
v: did you programmed soccerama for consoles systems? i’ve remembered a domark game named total soccer in which you appear as programmer.Is this correct? then, you programmed for snes, didn’t you?
r: soccerama was probably total soccer on the snes, there was a total soccer on the megadrive but I had nothing to do with it and it was a different game. i did program it but it was never released. There was a problem with a hard to find bug and Domark were unable to get me the equipment I needed to find it.

Images:

Dreamcast, Sega

Rent A Hero No. 1 [Dreamcast – Beta]

monokoma

01-04-2010

No Comments

Rent A Hero No. 1 is an action game / beat ’em up with RPG elements, developed by Sega and published for the Dreamcast in 2000, with an Xbox port in 2003. When the game was first announced in 1999, it did not look like the final version: the city layout was completely changed, the HUD and the MAP were different. From a video of the Rent-A-Hero No. 1 presentation at the V-jump Festival 99, shared by Carnivol from his YT channel, the combat seemed almost turn based or “on-rails”, while in the final game they play like in a classic action beat ’em up with free movements.

It’s possible that this 1999 version was still an early beta, but it’s interesting to notice how much the city was evolved from it’s initial form.

Images:

Videos (Beta @ 0:53):

For comparison, here’s a video from the final Xbox version:

Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

River Raid [SNES – Cancelled]

monokoma

31-03-2010

5 Comments

River Raid: The Mission of No Return (aka River Raid 3) is a cancelled shoot ’em up for the Super Nintendo, based on the original River Raid released in 1982 by Activision for the Atari 2600. The game was going to be published by Activision but it was later cancelled and only few screens remain preserved in the gallery below. Celine was able to find some of these images in Banzzai magazine #14 and Super Power #13.

The source code of River Raid SNES was found in 2001 by an user of the Atari Age forum:

I can tell you, that what I have of River Raid SNES, is mainly a source code dump from August of ’93. You’d have to recompile it in order to view it. I had one of my programmers do so just we could figure out what exactly we have on the floppy.

Some other info were found by Zwackery from the Atari Age Forum, in VideoGames magazine (vol. V, no. 11, Nov 1993). As we can read from the VGM article, “River Raid: The Mission of No Return” was shown at the summer CES 1991 in Chicago, along with the cancelled Kaboom: The Mad Bomber Returns.

It seems that “both got killed because the developers couldn’t push the SNES boundaires with either one” as noted by Klove in the Atari Age Forum.

Images: